4Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627-0171, and Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers, University of Central Florida, P.O. Box 162700, Orlando, Florida 32816-2700

Abstract

The recently developed theory that unifies the treatments of polarization and coherence of random electromagnetic beams is applied to study field correlations in Young’s interference experiment. It is found that at certain pairs of points the transmitted field is spatially fully coherent, irrespective of the state of coherence and polarization of the field that is incident on the two pinholes.